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Hidden Motives

​After many high profile failures to reform banking, thwarted by the power of the banking lobby, including efforts to break up banks “too big to fail,” it now seems that a simple and obvious rule has made a significant difference.

Awareness of our still growing income inequality has spread widely, and new accounts are accumulating weekly in the media. But this growing consensus is now starting to obscure something even more ominous,

Faced with yet another massacre of innocents, we all too readily think of it as “senseless” or “insane.” If the acts are horrifying we sometimes think of them as “evil;” if just random they seem crazy.

The wisdom of crowds doesn’t apply to picking stocks.
A new study published in the Journal of Portfolio Management shows that “hot stocks,” those that generate a lot of buzz and, as a result, move a lot, generally do not do well.

Presumably corporations would not want to overpay their CEOs, which is why they hire “compensation consultants.” The consultants study the publically available information on comparable CEO compensation so that they can benchmark their peers.
But it doesn't seem to work.

An accident on the internet last month exposed a hidden form of political corruption known as “dark money.” It allows corporations to donate funds to “social welfare groups” set up specifically to support their political interests while circumventing legal limits.
What does it mean?

The proliferation of celebrities in our culture is relatively recent. In the past, writers and actors sometimes became celebrated, well-known, even famous, but it was seldom something they aspired to. But now, what does this mean?

Hedge funds have been cloaked in mystery from the start, starting with the name. “To hedge” means to protect or limit, but in fact the funds have been among the more risky and obscure investment vehicles Wall Street has to offer.

Economists are beginning to question their jobs data. They had been focusing on the percentage of workers looking for work, and that news has gotten slightly better. But now they realize that the work force itself has been shrinking. That’s troubling and strange. It also changes their conclusions.

We can usually handle two sets of opinions, without having to conclude that one is wrong. But what about two truths, two conflicting sets of facts? We have that with employment figures and corporate taxes.

It’s a crude idea, an inelegant metaphor, but it makes a lot of sense. At a time when the financial industry appears to have a lock on mergers and acquisitions, the technology industry is taking another path. Larry Page calls in the "Toothbrush Test".

In the aftermath of the violence in Ferguson, Missouri, we have the beginnings of a long-overdue national discussion about the militarization of local police forces. But what is the difference between the police and the military?

Mergers are hot again: According to Thompson Reuters, “so far this year, $2.2 trillion in deals has been announced globally.” But nothing brings home the irrational frenzy of today’s Investor Capitalism so much as the impressive scale of some of the failures.

The powerful don’t empathize with those less powerful, according to new research reported in "The New York Times." The reason offered is that, “when people experience power, their brains fundamentally change how sensitive they are to the actions of others.”

It seems that the easiest people to scam are those who have been scammed. According to Doug Shadel an expert at AARP: “It’s pretty well known in the fraud world that the best list to get is the list of people who have already been taken.”